I'd like to know (if anyone does) whether any of the UK ONIX development is used in the Alstom production (eg TGV/Pendolino) for France or elsewhere.
I believe the class 373 Eurostar traction package (preceding ONIX I think) uses Preston design/components, but I've never been sure about any of the other production.
I travelled on a RENFE class S100 (TGV-derived) last year, a type which opened high speed services in Spain in 1992, and its builder's plate said GEC-Alsthom.
I wondered what, if anything, was its UK content.
The Class 373 Eurostars were a truly international project. The TMST (Trans Manche Super Train) consortium involved multi-disciplinary teams from several rolling stock companies in the UK, France and Belgium. GEC Traction were heavily involved at their Trafford Park and Preston factories and other parts of the GEC group, such as GEC Transformers in Stafford, also had important roles. Trafford Park was one of the lead sites for the development of the Traction system and the pre-production set of equipment spent many years on the Combined Test facility at Preston. It was possible to drive a complete half-set of power car equipment against load machines that were controlled to simulate the loading conditions on all the different routes. Trafford Park built the oil-cooled power modules and these were integrated into equipment frames at Preston (the Common Bloc) and in France (the Motor Blocs).
The close working relationships formed on the Eurostar project led directly to the creation of the GEC Alsthom joint venture in the early 1990s. Several years later one of the other major TMST partners, ACEC in Belgium, were taken over by GEC Alstom as the European rail industry consolidated to face the challenge of competition from the Far East (Japan and Korea at this time). All very topical on the day that the European Commission has blocked the Siemens Alstom merger! In 1998 GEC Alsthom was rebranded as Alstom (Alstom sans hache (without H) as they say in France, but more notably dropping the GEC prefix as well).
The equipment developed for Eurostar was quite bespoke and designed to comply with very challenging standards. This meant that it was not particularly attractive for use on other projects. There may have also been some commercial constraints on the use of the design that limited its adoptation elsewhere. Traction technology was also advancing rapidly at the time and within a few years the GTO (Gate Turn-Off) thyristor power electronics employed on Eurostar had been superseded by IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor) modules that were smaller, cheaper and lighter.
I would say the most successful product of the GEC Traction era was probably the vacuum circuit breaker (VCB). This became the standard for high speed switchgear on 25kV rolling stock across much of the world for over 25 years. The VCB was designed and developed at Trafford Park and built there and in Preston before transfer to France in the late 1990s.
Preston continued to manufacture Traction equipment for many international contracts throughout the 1990s and early 2000s with major projects in Taiwan, Malaysia, Sweden and the USA (New York subway). One little known fact is that a small number of Moscow Metro trains were built in 2000 equipped with Juniper Traction equipment (there were only minor changes to the Class 458 design). The trains had startling performance with an initial acceleration of 1.3m/s2. Unfortunately the follow-on order for several thousand "Juniperski" sets never materialised.
One of the last new build projects to be launched at Preston was the Traction equipment for new Paris metro trains. This was the first time that RATP had sourced major components from outside France. Unfortunately this proved to be a short-won success as a few months later the decision was taken to end new build at Preston and the project was completed in France.
